Rebecca Black is the teenager whose amateur music video “Friday” became a YouTube sensation. Ryan Dunn was an MTV star who appeared on the show “Jackass” and died in a car accident in June at age 34. Google + is Google’s social network.

Google's annual Zeitgeist is a look back at the year and its fastest rising search terms — as opposed to staples like such as "Lady Gaga" and "Justin Bieber," who have reigned in popular searches for a while. "Fastest rising" gives a better indication of what was hot at different points during the year.

“When looking at the data, it is fascinating to see the cultural fads and trends that took over the globe, from cupcakes (making top food lists in over a dozen countries) to the Dukan diet and high-profile weddings,” Google said in a blog posting, Bloomberg Businessweek reported.

The Zeitgeist provides lists for a selection of individual countries, and these lists provide a tantalizing, and often confounding, glimpse of how Web users’ concerns vary by region – or perhaps, who’s online in different places.

In the category of “What is…?” searches, for example, South Africans and Americans both relied on the Internet to answer their health questions (“What is HIV,” “What is AIDS” and “What is cancer” made South Africa’s top ten while the top ten US "What is...?" searches included searches on gluten, autism, lupus and gout.)

British searchers, perhaps because of their National Health Service, didn’t have as many health queries (only “What is piles” made the UK top ten), but turned to the Internet for help with legal and culinary issues, including “What is copyright,” “What is probate,” “What is scampi” and “What is truffle.”

And in Brazil, Web searchers sought assistance understanding the environment. Two of the top five “What is…?” searches in Brazil asked for explanations of sustainability and biodiversity.

The word news most often conjures up visions of U.S. troops in Afghanistan, the troubled global economy, a political crisis in Washington, erupting volcanoes and devastating earthquakes. But as we all know, there is far more to news than that. Indeed, it’s often the wacky, weird, offbeat and sometimes off-color stories that can most intrigue and fascinate us. Those stories can range from changing astrological signs to lost pyramids in Egypt but in their essence they all cast new light on the shared human condition in all of its wild diversity.